The Israeli military says it has discovered tunnels underneath the main headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City, alleging that Hamas militants used the space as an electrical supply room.
The unveiling of the tunnels marked the latest chapter in Israel’s campaign against the embattled agency, which it accuses of collaborating with Hamas.
Recent Israeli allegations that a dozen staff members participated in the Hamas attack on Israel Oct. 7 plunged the agency into a financial crisis, prompting major donor states to suspend their funding as well as twin investigations. The agency says that Israel has also frozen its bank account, embargoed aid shipments and canceled its tax benefits.
The army invited journalists to view the tunnel on Thursday.
This article seems to allege electrical and communication cables were run through the ground between the UNRWA headquarters and the tunnel network?
If true they buried the lede here. Idgaf where the tunnels are - when you dig a miles long tunnel, it’ll go under a lot of unrelated buildings. If however the headquarters was serving as a communication relay and power supply, then that’s pretty damning.
I’ll argue you on the damning part.
If someone illegally, and without your consent, taps into your power lines and steals electricity to run say, a weed grow operation, are you suddenly now affiliated with that drug ring? No, of course not, you weren’t involved and are also a victim
If however you allowed that to happen, that’s a different story. The IDF has a high burden of proof to clear here, especially after their big claims of Al-Shifa and the cemetery fell flat
Sure agreed if they didn’t know, but it seems like there was at least a Hamas cell inside the UNRWA that did:
My paint remains though - the wires might be linked from the building to the tunnel, but it’s a jump to say the UNRWA is complicit instead of a victim
As is often the case in these kinds of discussions, you are both right.
Yes, if there was complicity on the part of UNRWA that’s messed up.
And yes, the cabling involved looks like it had to have had someone in a restricted area of UNRWA setting it up.
But also yes, it could have been being done without the organization’s knowledge by anything from a Hamas operative wearing a hardhat after interfering with their Wi-Fi to agents infiltrating as employees. Intelligence services do that kind of infiltrating and setup quite frequently.
And once set up, I’d be quite surprised if this was going to be caught in a routine inspection. It just looks like a slightly below ground cable feed. It’d be weird to even look at the cables and think “I wonder if there’s a secret server room below here.”
Well to use your analogy here, let’s say a weed grow operation steals your electricity by plugging extension cords into several outlets and running them through open windows. Further let’s say this goes on for years with you living in the house. At a certain point it strains credulity to believe that you aren’t in on it.
Something similar seems to have happened here. It doesn’t implicate the UNRWA as a whole, but it certainly raises questions about the employees at this location.